The third plenum of Chinese Communist Party Congresses is often the time when the country’s rulers introduce major policy shifts. The Eighteenth Party Congress in November and, crucially, implementation over time of policies announced there offers the U.S. an opportunity to reassess China, to see whether top leaders Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang are interested in pursuing…

China is far more economically open today than the Soviet Union was when its collapse surprised the U.S. policy community in 1991. Still, the Chinese Communist Party controls and manipulates the information it releases. The prevailing American view of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a rising economic superpower, even if struggling a bit, is based on this poor…

A trade agreement’s rules of origin indicate how to treat goods and services from sources that are not party to the agreement. Modern global commerce is characterized by sophisticated chains of manufacture and assembly across multiple countries. Rules of origin have thus become more important, contentious, and complex. For the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), billed by…

Better late than never. The absence of pro-market economic reform in China is now widely recognized, if years too late. Much of the world awaits the Communist Party’s autumn plenary meetings, hoping for a restart of the process. According to General Secretary Xi Jinping, his new government will “deepen” reform.[1] But what is packaged as reform will not be welcome outside…

It has been increasingly forgotten over the past 20 years that Japan has a great deal to offer the United States and the world. In security affairs, a vibrant Japan and healthy Japan–U.S. alliance will help stabilize an otherwise volatile East Asia for another generation. In economics, post war Japan was a major force for greater global competition and the increasing…

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) scored a landslide victory in upper-house parliamentary elections on Sunday. With the LDP now in control of both houses of the national legislature, the stage is set for Abe to be a transformational Japanese leader. But decades of Japanese policy inertia were caused by deeper endemic factors…

The tidal wave of Chinese investment around the world predicted by some and feared by others has not materialized and is unlikely to. Various obstacles to overseas spending by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) kept growth moderate in the first half of 2013. Energy was again the focus, but the dominance of state-owned enterprises has begun to ease.
Chinese investment in…

Permitting the acquisitions of Sprint by Japan’s SoftBank and Smithfield by China’s Shuanghui is in America’s national interest. Except for narrowly defined security reasons, the default position of the U.S. government should be to keep out of private-sector transactions.
The Shuanghui–Smithfield deal is nothing more than one food company purchasing another; there are no…

The Trans-Pacific Partnership has become the principal American trade initiative, and perhaps the principal trade initiative globally. One reason for its importance is that it is intended to set a precedent for treatment of state-owned enterprises, which operate in competition with commercial firms but are owned by a national or local government.
The very purpose of most…

President Obama and the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, will meet June 7–8 in California. The meeting has been characterized as a way for the two to establish a personal relationship and build trust. This would all be well if it were President Obama’s first year in office and Sino–American ties were on a sound footing. But it is not and they…

Testimony for
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission
by Derek Scissors
May 9, 2013
Now and for some time to come, the bulk of Chinese investment in the United States will take the form of Treasury bond holdings. Excluding bonds, Chinese investment in the U.S. is a $50 billion issue that could have been a $75 billion issue already and will be a $100…

IntroductionIn real terms, there is no denying the extraordinary progress in the engagement between India and the United States over the past two decades. Throughout, and even after, the Cold War, the world's two largest democracies remained estranged. In the first decade after the end of the Cold War, the two countries quarreled over nuclear nonproliferation; the U.S.…

Every day, U.S. policymakers are faced with choices that will determine the future of American leadership in Asia. One such set of choices involves the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) currently being negotiated.
The TPP is a set of trade and investment negotiations among the U.S., Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and…

It has been a bad half-decade for American foreign economic policy. The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha round was mortally wounded in 2008. The last three bilateral trade agreements were stalled and then renegotiated. The next one is not even on the radar screen. While the 11-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and a possible agreement with the 27-nation European…

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